The Faculty of Psychology

The Faculty of Psychology was established in the spring of 2003 through the separation of the Institute for Psychology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. A significant influx of students meant that this young faculty quickly caught up in size with its institutional peers in Basel. Its current profile stems not only from numerical growth but especially from the breadth of innovative changes its curriculum and research have experienced in recent years.

Together with the Faculty of Philosophy, from which it originated, psychology today has experienced the largest increase in student numbers at the university. In terms of the proportion of women students, it currently leads by a wide margin. Of the 908 individuals counted as students or doctoral candidates in the fall semester of 2008, 720 were women. This preponderance – at 80 percent – is unmatched by any other faculty. However, as of 2010 this ratio was not yet reflected at the level of full professorships: among the heads of the nine psychological divisions in 2010, six were men and three were women.

A broad scope of teaching and research
Since the establishment of its own institute in 1978, psychology at the University of Basel focused almost exclusively on the areas of “general psychology and developmental psychology,” “clinical psychology,” and “methodology.” And since 1996, each of these areas has been covered by a full professorship, represented in 2010 in divisions devoted to “developmental and personality psychology,” “clinical psychology and psychotherapy,” and “general psychology and methodology.”

New areas have been filled with professorships since 2002, that is to say, in anticipation of the faculty’s founding and the years to follow. As of 2010, six additional divisions were been added, each led by a professorship: “social and economic psychology,” “child and adolescent psychology,” “epidemiology and health psychology,” “cognitive and decision sciences,” “molecular psychology,” and finally “economic psychology,” which was established with a tenure track assistant professorship since 1 September 2008.

An emphasis on economics and the natural sciences
The thematic focus of the faculty’s professorships highlights two dominant specializations in research and teaching beyond more general areas. One is on decision-making and economic psychology, technically two separate fields, yet closely related in the respective divisions. Additionally, the professorship in molecular psychology indicates a clear orientation toward approaches from the natural sciences.

Interdisciplinary research is being done in both economic and molecular psychology. Accordingly, the Division of Molecular Psychology is located both at the Faculty of Psychology and at the university’s Biocenter. This institutionalized interdisciplinarity is also reflected in the team’s composition, which includes experts from medicine, biology, and psychology. The division’s major project as of 2010, which investigates the molecular foundations of human memory to find treatments for memory disorders, also includes geneticists and computer scientists.

The benefits of application
A common feature of current research initiatives is the focus on practical application, whether in the economic or clinical field. In an era where securing external funding is becoming increasingly crucial for a discipline’s sustainability and advancement, emphasizing an applied approach creates favorable conditions. Indeed, the amount of external funding secured by the Faculty of Psychology rose from 100,000 to 4.6 million Swiss francs in its first four years (2003–2006).

External funding was also available for the SESAM research program (Swiss Etiological Study of Adjustment and Mental Health), which was discontinued due to a lack of participants in addition to legal and ethical hurdles. Here too, the focus was on application-oriented benefits. The study, which aimed to observe 3,000 children from the twentieth week of pregnancy until the age of twenty, was intended to uncover the psychological, social, and biological-genetic factors contributing to healthy mental development. To ensure the feasibility of such large-scale projects in the future, not only the expected benefits but also the legal and ethical feasibility must be comprehensively assessed in advance.